Xbox One's exterior casing consists of a two-tone "liquid black" finish; with half finished in a matte grey, and the other in a glossier black. The design was intended to evoke a more entertainment-oriented and simplified look than previous iterations of the console; among other changes.

It is powered by an AMD "Jaguar" Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) with two quad-core modules totaling eight x86-64 cores clocked at 1.75 GHz, and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s. The memory subsystem also features an additional 32 MB of "embedded static" RAM, or ESRAM, with a memory bandwidth of 109 GB/s.